Automatic Lecture Recording

Lecture recording has become a very common tool to provide students with additional media for their examination preparations. While its effort has to stay reasonable, only a very basic way of recording is done in many cases. Therefore, watching the resulting videos can get very boring completely independent of how interesting the original topic or session was. This thesis proposes a new approach to lecture recordings by letting distributed computers emulate the work of a human camera team, which is the natural way of creating attractive recordings. This thesis is structured in six chapters, starting with the examination of the current situation, and taking its constraints into account. The first chapter concludes with a reflection on related work. Chapter two is about the design of our prototype system. It is deduced from a human camera team in the real world which gets transferred into the virtual world. Finally, a detailed overview about all parts necessary for our prototype and their planned functionality is given. In chapter three, the implementation of all parts and tasks and the incidents occurring during implementation are described in detail. Chapter four describes the technical experiences made with the different parts during development, testing and evaluation with a view to functionality, performance, and an proposal towards future work. The evaluation of the whole system with students is presented and discussed in the fifth chapter. Chapter six concludes this thesis by summing up the facts and gives an outlook on future work

Who Owns the Images? The Paradox of Archives, between Commercialization, Free Circulation and Respect

Digitization carries the utopian promise of archival access unlimited by constraints of space and time, and with it, of new forms of research and historiographies. In reality, digital image archives pose a complex set of technical, legal, ethical and methodological challenges, particularly for film and media studies and adjacent fields. In a series of studies and interviews with practitioners, scholars and theorists, this volume draws a detailed map of these challenges and offers perspectives for further research and creative practice

Movie / Cinema: Rearrangements of the Apparatus in Contemporary Movie Circulation

This thesis investigates how cinema’s specificities are defined in relation to technological developments. I propose that the most appropriate way to do this is by taking the whole cinematographic circuit into account – that is, the complete set of socio-technical operations that are involved in the medium, as remote as they might seem to be from actual cinematographic practices. I depart from the definition of circulation as a socio-technical continuum of the production, distribution, exhibition and evaluation of movies, explaining how these activities might be enacted in three different technological regimes: film, video and digital computation. Then, following an account of the early history of the pirate film society Cine Falcatrua (2003-2005), I show how the specificity of the medium is constituted and preserved throughout its technical progress. Acknowledging the limits of traditional film and screen studies to deal with these questions, I attempt to find an alternative research approach by engaging in practice-based investigation using curatorial strategies. By bringing together and analysing different film and art pieces in an exhibition entitled Denied Distances (2009), I propose a framework that allows an understanding of how media technology are defined in relation to one another, exposing how seemingly expanded practices such as installations and performances might be contained within conventional cinematographic apparatus. I conclude by suggesting that, in order to keep up with the ever-changing nature of the medium, the study of cinema would profit from engaging the extremes of scientific criticism and art practice

The truth-machine: continuity and the ontology of the moving image of cinema

The analytical nature of representation is inconsistent with the homogeneity of the continuum. This inconsistency determines the moving image of cinema; for, the cinematographic apparatus employs photographic still images to reconstitute the appearance of motion of the real world. Bergson claims that this cinematographic perception is also characteristic of our understanding of the real world; the qualitative essence of movement and time is spatially abstracted through representation for the demands of differentiation and quantification. Ensuing an overturning of time's relation to movement in modern philosophy, Deleuze's theory for the image rectifies the misconception of cinematic movement as discontinuity. Considering the novel representability of continuity in the cinema, this thesis proceeds to a rethinking of the image's significance for an understanding of worldly being by defining a new ontological account for the moving Image. The study of the technological genesis of the moving image discloses its ontological difference from the photographic image. Scrutinizing representation of movement in chronophotographic practice, the spatial abstraction of continuity caused by photographic seriality Is revealed thus enabling a departure from the traditional understanding of cinema's temporality. The practice based research - which is also concerned with the issues of continuity's representability and the falsification of perception of the moving and still Image - produces formal cinematic devices used for the making of the feature length documentary an Anthology of Easter. Challenging the conventional poetic and aesthetic modalities of non-fiction film, it addresses the question of the continuity of movement, time and space and engages with the intelligible perception of the real world as a referent of the moving image. Finally, the thesis proposes that the moving image of cinema enhances the notion of indexicality; for, it provides us the unique representational sign that retains the continuous nature of time, in the image of the real world

Cadavre Exquis: Forking Paths from surrealism to interactive film

info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Mediated authority : portraits of the writer in the age of mechanical reproduction from Baudelaire to Beigbeder

Through the study of visual artefacts created around French writers between the 1850s and the present, this project seeks to examine the role of visual culture in the fashioning of writers’ artistic and social identities. The writers considered, Charles Baudelaire, Colette, Romain Gary and, to a lesser extent, Frédéric Beigbeder, lived through times when the world of visual media was undergoing major changes due to the advent of new technologies, respectively, photography, cinema and television. Paintings, photographs, films, but also extracts of TV shows will therefore testify to various discursive and non-discursive phenomena at work in the depiction of the cultural figure of the author, such as the staging of a public auctorial identity, the construction of a persona for marketing purposes, or the fictionalization of personal history, but they will demonstrate as well that literature may have entered a new stage when words and writing are no longer the only essential feature of a literary career.French and Italia

The Cinema of Extractions: Film as Infrastructure for (Artistic?) Research

In contemporary discussions of film and artistic research, the historical undercurrent of film as an intense research and development activity, does not seem to be widely discussed. In contrast, film history and media archaeology has since long re-evaluated the status of early moving image technologies, which do not any longer denote pre-cinematic curiosities that simply predate the institution of cinema and its narrative forms but is rather seen as containing socio-technical trajectories and aesthetic regimes that can be studied in their own right. This essay performs a further modulation of the legacies of film history, one in which moving image technology is not seen as primarily a vehicle for film as cinema, but a continuously evolving technological and aesthetic infrastructure for film as research. This then becomes the starting point from which to reflect on artistic research in film, which today is being institutionalized as a form of practice-based research, arguably with the risk of loosing sight of an already long-established tradition of film, not only as research but also as artistic research. With the aid of an accompanying desktop video essay, the article speculates on the changing contexts of film as research visà-vis film as artistic research, from early cinema and its connection to scientific discoveries and the advanced data-analysis of today’s streaming platforms. Inspired by “The New Film History” and Tom Gunning’s influential notion of “The Cinema of Attractions” which revised the view on early cinema and the development of a filmic avant-garde, the presentation eventually focuses on artistic responses to the contemporary “Cinema of Extractions”, as a datafied infrastructure that now conditions what is knowable and sayable through the moving image

Bastard or playmate? Adapting theatre, mutating media and the contemporary performing arts

Artistic media seem to be in a permanent condition of mutation and transformation. Contemporary artists often investigate the limits and possibilities of the media they use and experiment with the crossing, upgrading and mutilation of media. Others explicitly explore the unknown intermedial space between existing media, searching for the hybrid beings that occupy these in-betweens. This publication explores the theme of mutating and adapting media in its relation with theatre and performance